In this crisis, and in the hope that the Russian Revolution would promote democratic contacts and trade with the United States, some of these former German professors announced courses in Russian. There was often something humorous and grotesque about this, for there were few if any textbooks and the professors themselves had little knowledge of the language. The situation in some cases was scandalous. There is little reason to do more than mention the existence of this situation. Even well-known scholars lent themselves to it, only to report a few years later that there was no call for Russian. As a result, the sudden flurry of Russian courses was without result and in the years after the War, they were more or less quietly abandoned. It accentuated the common notion that Russian could not be learned, an idea energetically fostered for various reasons. No one took the trouble to realize that the necessary preliminaries, such as the publication of grammars, were yet to be done. There were no books available, save a few published in England, and no real teachers, save some chance immigrants who owed their opportunities more to good fortune than to ability or training. Yet the war period did serve to strengthen those departments which had been previously established. It brought a few new individuals into the picture and above all it aroused a sense of need that was slowly to be satisfied. CHAPTER 5 SLAVIC EFFORTS BEFORE WORLD WAR I In the preceding chapters, dealing with the gradual development of an intellectual interest in Slavic questions, we have largely ignored the activity of Slavic groups in the United States. This was deliberate, for the early stages of Slavic study were almost completely apart from the work of the Slavs themselves and involved only those persons who had come to the United States and achieved prominence or success outside of their own communities and background. These early Slavic efforts could make little imprint upon the American public, for the first steps were taken under most adverse conditions. The Slavic masses were composed for the most part of the underprivileged groups who had come to America in the hope of working for a few years and then returning. Later they became American citizens, but until 1914 a surprising percentage of the Slavs had not taken out citizenship papers. For their self-protection and mutual advantage these masses had formed their own churches and fraternal organizations. There were in the nineteenth century many difficulties to be encountered by each and the communities lived apart with relatively little social or political contact with the rest of the population.